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Boone Gourlay

Artist member since 2022
Pro
Toronto, Ontario

Adam Gourlay is an interdisciplinary artist that focuses on painting, drawing, and performance.

His most recent work involves exploring humour, honesty, memory, and truth. Key to this exploration is finding the balance between the maximal and the minimal, both in terms of composition, movements, stories, colours, and information. Experiments in application, additive methods, subtractive methods, and mark-making become part of the story of the work and are integral to the process. Most of the substrates he paints on and the tools he uses are repurposed or upcycled. These abstracted stories allow him to explore how objects, the land and people hold memory and how time, experience, and the stories we tell ourselves distorts it.

He has performed stand-up and sketch comedy at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and across North America. His comedic experiences, especially improv and a mathematical approach to humour, impact his visual art. He has blended his love of comedy and visual art together to create a surreal style he refers to as 'Motel Art', which finds humour in the everyday and in very specific ways.

His work has been shown at the An Nasctha Gallery in Liverpool, and the Ada Slaight Gallery in Toronto. He has created works with the OSA and Ontario Archives, self-published a book of drawings called “Fuzzy Brain” and created a zine called, “Bob Ross Burned Down the White House".


Work


Q+A

Beverage of choice

Room temp. coffee

Favourite musical artist / band right now

Talking Heads

Best season of the year in Toronto

Baseball

Describe the person your work appeals to in 3 words

dumb, smart, real

Describe your home in 3 words

Messy, loving, fun

Favourite movie

Planes, Trains, & Automobiles

Select Past Exhibitions
2022

OCAD University, Toronto
GradEx 107

2022

Ada Slaight Gallery, Toronto
Archive of Merit: From OSA to OCAD

2021

An Nasctha Gallery, Liverpool
Art in Solitude

2020

Ada Slaight Gallery, Toronto
First Self: Investigating Cultural Appropriation

2019

Virtual Exhibition, Toronto
Sustainable Interventions

Accolades
2018

Adam Gourlay
Mark Breslin Award for Stand-up Comedy Excellence

Education
2022

OCAD University
Drawing & Painting, BFA

2018

Humber College
Comedy Writing & Performance, Diploma

2013

Fanshawe College
Business- Marketing, Diploma

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